decklebench

Thanks for the positive tone!

Regarding annotations, the "Fast & Cheap" paper contains the following:

The language uses carefully chosen default capabilities to minimise the required annotations. In addition, the compiler guides the programmer as to which annotations should be used, infers annotations locally, and performs automatic recovery in some circumstances. As a result, when implementing LINPACK GUPS (in app. F) we require just 8 capability annotations and 3 uses of recover in 249 LOC. In approximately 10k LOC in the standard library, 89.3% of types required no annotation.

The term "capability” is much older than Pony, and the concept was proposed in the 60s. We would have loved to use a different word, but there are not enough different recognisable words in the English language.

We use capabilities in Pony to statically avoid data races - not for security. But we believe that Pony's capabilities can also be developed further to support security - would be great to try and program Sandstorm’s security with them.

Exactly: it will clean an actor, once there are no messages to it, and it has no work to do, and there are no references to it (or any references come from such actors which have no work themselves -- i.e. are in a cycle).

The benchmarks reported on the web page (http://ponylang.org) and also reported at http://ponylang.org/papers/fast-cheap.pdf are more recent, and for these the code was run for different languages, and on one machine.

We are just emerging from stealth mode... sorry. The web site is up and running now (modulo DNS update)